Kevin Anderson’s scary ‘optimistic’ scenario

Kevin Ander­son, of the world renowned cli­mate sci­ence Tyn­dall Cen­tre, was in Glas­gow last week giv­ing a talk in which he took the most opti­mistic IPCC mod­els he could and still arrived at a pic­ture of the future in which human extinc­tion seemed pret­ty much assured since ‘mar­ket eco­nom­ics can­not deal with non-mar­gin­al changes’ and he couldn’t see the pop­u­lace and politi­cians being will­ing to embark on the dra­mat­ic changes need­ed. He argued that ten years ago we could have made the tran­si­tion to a cli­mate safe econ­o­my, now we could still make it but it would be bumpy, if we wait anoth­er ten years it will be very painful and may be too late. Cur­rent inter­na­tion­al nego­ti­a­tions, if suc­cess­ful, are like­ly to take us to 4C. To hold at 3C (if hold is pos­si­ble at that tem­per­a­ture, with arc­tic melt, for­est fires, and methane release feed­backs under­way) would require a 9% cut in emis­sions per year, to aim for ‘hold­ing’ at 4C would require a 3.5% cut pa. He argued that we aren’t polit­i­cal­ly and social­ly capa­ble of cut­ting by 9%; and although we can cut by 3.5%, we can’t live at 4C. Despite his analy­sis, Kevin was a com­plete­ly engag­ing pre­sen­ter, get­ting laughs sev­er­al times, espe­cial­ly when he said that the only way we know to cut emis­sions rapid­ly is eco­nom­ic reces­sion, lat­er adding that the col­lapse of the Sovi­et econ­o­my had cut emis­sions there by 5% a year, half the rate of reduc­tion need­ed now.

Why did the audi­ence find it so fun­ny that cut­ting emis­sions meant end­ing eco­nom­ic growth? It remind­ed me of Monbiot’s point about ‘eco­nom­ic growth’ being our ‘immor­tal­i­ty project’, our col­lec­tive denial of our own and our planet’s lim­its. Speak­ing with Kevin after­wards I asked him why he didn’t direct­ly address the point and say out loud that this par­tic­u­lar eco­nom­ic sys­tem is the force dri­ving extinc­tion? His answer was arrest­ing: he feared that if he said this explic­it­ly then peo­ple would dis­miss every­thing else he is say­ing. This fear – that the one thing that needs to be com­mu­ni­cat­ed can’t be com­mu­ni­cat­ed – can be summed up by one word: taboo. Break­ing a taboo means no longer being wor­thy of con­sid­er­a­tion. This explains why all such attempts tend to dress up the move from eco­nom­ic growth to a sus­tain­able econ­o­my in terms of improved hap­pi­ness and well-being rather than going straight to the point: this econ­o­my is killing peo­ple and plan­et, and it has to be trans­formed, and trans­formed now.